Willingness to Pay Estimation When Protest Beliefs are not Separable from the Public Good Definition

Public good attributes that are correlated with protest beliefs but not separable from the good's value, would affect stated preference estimates of the WTP for the public good. Survey data collected to value a program to prevent ecosystem losses on Nevada rangelands, where the majority of land is publicly owned and managed, reveal more than half of the respondents exhibiting some protest belief. Of these, about 60% voted 'yes' to some nonzero bid amount. By treating protest beliefs and opposition to the proposed program as separate concepts, we systematically analyze their determinants and impacts on WTP. In this framework, people with protest beliefs may or may not vote 'no' to all bids and people may, without being protesters, answer 'no' to all dollar amounts. Multinomial logit regression results suggest that factors motivating people to protest and/or oppose the proposed program are so diverse that a single model does not provide a good fit. We estimate nested models and conclude that different underlying processes determine WTP for "protesters" ($34.02) and "non-protesters" ($69.56).Stated preferences; Willingness to pay; Protest responses; Rangelands; Valuation of ecosystem services

Touch-Based Ontology Browsing on Tablets and Surfaces

Semantic technologies and Linked Data are increasingly adopted as core application modules, in many knowledge domains and involving various stakeholders: ontology engineers, software architects, doctors, employees, etc. Such a diffusion calls for better access to models and data, which should be direct, mobile, visual and time effective. While a relevant core of research efforts investigated the problem of ontology visualization, discovering different paradigms, layouts, and interaction modalities, a few approaches target mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Touch interaction, indeed, has the potential of dramatically improving usability of Linked Data and of semantic-based solutions in real-world applications and mash-ups, by enabling direct and tactile interactions with involved knowledge objects. In this paper, we move a step towards touch-based, mobile interfaces for semantic models by presenting an ontology browsing platform for Android devices. We exploit state of the art touch-based interaction paradigms, e.g., pie menus, pinch-to-zoom, etc., to empower effective ontology browsing. Our research mainly focuses on interactions, yet providing support to different visualization approaches thanks to a clear decoupling between model-level operation and visual representations. Presented results include the design and implementation of a working prototype application, as well as a first validation involving habitual users of semantic technologies. Results show a low learning curve and positive reactions to the proposed paradigms, which are perceived as both innovative and useful

Willingness to Pay Estimation When Protest Beliefs are not Separable from the Public Good Definition

Public good attributes that are correlated with protest beliefs but not separable from the good\u27s value, would affect stated preference estimates of the WTP for the public good. Survey data collected to value a program to prevent ecosystem losses on Nevada rangelands, where the majority of land is publicly owned and managed, reveal more than half of the respondents exhibiting some protest belief. Of these, about 60% voted \u27yes\u27 to some nonzero bid amount. By treating protest beliefs and opposition to the proposed program as separate concepts, we systematically analyze their determinants and impacts on WTP. In this framework, people with protest beliefs may or may not vote \u27no\u27 to all bids and people may, without being protesters, answer \u27no\u27 to all dollar amounts. Multinomial logit regression results suggest that factors motivating people to protest and/or oppose the proposed program are so diverse that a single model does not provide a good fit. We estimate nested models and conclude that different underlying processes determine WTP for protesters ($34.02) and non-protesters ($69.56)

Second CLIPS Conference Proceedings, volume 1

Topics covered at the 2nd CLIPS Conference held at the Johnson Space Center, September 23-25, 1991 are given. Topics include rule groupings, fault detection using expert systems, decision making using expert systems, knowledge representation, computer aided design and debugging expert systems

Reasoning of Competitive Non-Functional Requirements in Agent-Based Models

During the decision-making process in real-time competitive environments, there is a need to perform concurrent optimisation of multiple competitive objectives to select an optimal design decision for interdependent stakeholders. To handle such issues, this thesis successfully assimilates the goal-oriented requirements-engineering knowledge with analytical decision-making approaches to facilitate reasoning and analysis by encouraging stakeholders’ involvement. This leads to optimal decisions with domain knowledge improvement in the agent-based i*-goal model by balancing multiple conflicting non-functional requirements reciprocally

An Investigation of Digital Reference Interviews: A Dialogue Act Approach

The rapid increase of computer-mediated communications (CMCs) in various forms such as micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), online chatting (e.g. digital reference) and community- based question-answering services (e.g. Yahoo! Answers) characterizes a recent trend in web technologies, often referred to as the social web. This trend highlights the importance of supporting linguistic interactions in people\u27s online information-seeking activities in daily life - something that the web search engines still lack because of the complexity of this hu- man behavior. The presented research consists of an investigation of the information-seeking behavior of digital reference services through analysis of discourse semantics, called dialogue acts, and experimentation of automatic identification of dialogue acts using machine-learning techniques. The data was an online chat reference transaction archive, provided by the Online Computing Library Center (OCLC). Findings of the discourse analysis include supporting evidence of some of the existing theories of the information-seeking behavior. They also suggest a new way of analyzing the progress of information-seeking interactions using dia- logue act analysis. The machine learning experimentation produced promising results and demonstrated the possibility of practical applications of the DA analysis for further research across disciplines

Teacher-Student Interaction: The Overlooked Dimension Of Inquiry-Based Professional Development

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, School of Education, 2008This study explores the teacher-student interactional dimension of inquiry-based science instruction. In it, microethnographic and grounded theory analyses are conducted in order to assess the impact of a professional development program designed to enhance in-service elementary teachers' interactional views (i.e., their understandings of inquiry-based social roles and relationships) and discursive practices (i.e., teachers' abilities to interact with student engaged in classroom inquiries) through a combination of expert instruction, immersion in scientific inquiry, and collaborative analysis of video-recorded classroom discourse. A sociolinguistic theoretical perspective on language use is adopted, viewing classroom discourse as comprising multiple linguistic signs (questions, responses, personal pronouns, hedges, backchannels, reactive tokens, directives, figures of speech, parallel repetitions) that convey not only semantic meanings (the literal information being exchanged) but also pragmatic meanings (information about teachers and students' social roles and relationships). A grounded theory analysis of the professional development activities uncovered a gradual shift in teachers' interactional views from a cognitive, monofunctional and decontextualized perspective to a social, multifunctional and contextualized conception of inquiry-based discourse. Furthermore, teachers developed increased levels of pragmatic awareness, being able to recognize the authoritative interactional functions served by discursive moves such as display questions, cued elicitation, convergent questioning, verbal cloze, affirmation, explicit evaluations of students' responses, verbatim repetitions, IRE triplets, IR couplets, second-person pronouns, "I/you" contrastive pairs, and direct or impolite directives. A comparative microethnographic analysis of teachers' classroom practices revealed that after participating in the program teachers demonstrated an improved ability to share authority and to transfer expert interactional rights to students by strategically adopting (1) questioning behaviors that were relatively more student-centered, divergent, reflective, and sincere; (2) reactive behaviors that were more neutral and informative; (3) directive behaviors that were more polite, indirect and inclusive; and, (4) poetic behaviors that fostered more involvement. Such ability allowed teachers to establish more symmetric and involved social relationships with students engaged in classroom inquiries. The above changes in teachers' interactional views and discursive practices are taken as evidence of the effectiveness of an explicit, reflective, authentic and contextualized approach to inquiry-based professional development